Anarchy 89/Reflections on the revolution in France

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Reflections on the
revolution in France

JOHN VANE

France. The re­vival of the great tradi­tion after nearly a cen­tury—1789, 1830, 1848, 1871—from the storm­ing of the Bastille to the fall of the Com­mune. A re­minder that most of our polit­ical ideas (and the words they are ex­pressed in) come from France. (It makes it easier to under­stand why old Kropot­kin wanted to fight for France in 1914.) But how the tradi­tion has be­come divided! The Tricolour, the Repub­lic, the Mar­seil­laise, the Re­sist­ance—all sym­bols of the estab­lish­ment, of the ex­treme right. But that is nothing new. “Liberty, equal­ity, frat­ern­ity, when what the Repub­lic really means is in­fantry, cav­alry, artil­lery”—said Marx 120 years ago. What is new is that people are sur­prised when the French stu­dents oc­cupy the uni­vers­ities and the French work­ers oc­cupy the factor­ies. The tradi­tion must be part of the French people’s polit­ical edu­ca­tion. We still re­mem­ber our Hunger Marches, our Gen­eral Strike, our Suf­fragettes, our Black Sunday, our chart­ists; surely the French may be ex­pec­ted to re­mem­ber the Re­sist­ance, the sit-in strikes of 1936, the <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: mut­inies

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of 1917">mut­inies

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of 1917, the syn­dic­al­ist move­ment before the First World War, the Com­mune, the July Days, the Great Fear. We are hardly in close touch with French af­fairs, but recent issues of anarchy men­tioned “the sort of activ­ism which is en­demic at the bour­geois Sor­bonne” (Peter Redan Black in anarchy 84) and de­scribed the sit-in strike in Besan­con (Proud­hon’s home town!) at the begin­ning of last year (Chris Marker in anarchy 76). After all, the Nan­terre stu­dents have been strug­gling with the au­thor­ities for a year; where have all the ex­perts been?

★

Revolution. A timely re­minder that when you come down to it you have to go out into the streets and con­front the forces of the state. That in the end ony a trem­end­ous and ter­ri­fy­ing change in the way so­ciety is organ­ised can bring about what we want. That this will not hap­pen by itself, but that some­one has to de­cide to make it hap­pen. That we have to be pre­mature (only pre­mature action leads to mature action), that we have to make mis­takes (people who don’t make mis­takes don’t make any­thing), that we have to take risks (the blood of mar­tyrs is still, alas, the seed of the faith), that we have to begin by look­ing rid­ic­u­lous and end by look­ing futile. A re­mind­er of William Morris, in A Dream of John Ball, pon­der­ing “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their de­feat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under an­other name”. A re­minder of the dan­ger of re­volu­tion, in being what Engels called “the most au­thor­it­arian thing ima­gin­able”, in pro­vok­ing counter-re­volu­tion, in tend­ing towards nihil­ism, in ex­pos­ing one’s weak­nesses and giv­ing away one’s strengths, in rais­ing false hopes and bring­ing des­pair.

  Tragic to be so near and yet so far. The young people tak­ing the streets, the in­tel­lect­u­als taking the uni­vers­it­ies, the work­ers tak­ing the fact­or­ies, the farm­ers on their tract­ors—if only the work­ers had run the fact­or­ies that made cars to re­place those de­stroyed in the fight­ing, if only the farm­ers had sent food into the towns for no­thing and re­ceived tract­ors for no­thing in re­turn, if only the shops had opened and the pub­lic trans­port had run with­out pay­ment, what could the police or even the army have done? Who dare say it couldn’t happen, after Russia in 1917 and Spain in 1936?

★

Comités d’action. The action com­mit­tees which sprang up in Paris are the obvi­ous des­cend­ants of the coun­cils and com­mit­tees (Soviets) which have always spon­tane­ously ap­peared in pop­ular ris­ings of this kind. Here is the na­tural ad­min­ist­rat­ive unit of so­ciety which we want in place of the par­lia­ment, ex­ecut­ive com­mit­tees, re­pre­sent­at­ive coun­cil, or what­ever, which takes de­ci­sions out of the hands of the people they af­fect. Here is the ad­min­ist­ra­tion of things which must come in­stead of the gov­ern­ment of people.

★

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“Group­us­cules”. Odd how small polit­ical groups—such as the anarch­ists—are often hated and feared by the estab­lish­ment, but are patron­ised and writ­ten off by many rebels. Surely both sides are wrong. They have no power, and yet in re­volu­tion­ary con­di­tions it is often their mem­bers who keep their heads and feed the ideas which the move­ment lives on. Of course tradi­tion­al­ists and sect­arians have little to con­trib­ute when things really begin hap­pen­ing, but con­scious ex­trem­ists still seem to have a part to play, and it is good to see them pul­ling to­gether when things do hap­pen.

★

Marxism. Inter­est­ing how it has man­aged to sur­vive what the Com­mun­ists and So­cial Demo­crats have done to it between them, to say no­thing of the so­cio­logists. The liber­tarian Marx­ists seem closer to Marx and Engels than the ortho­dox Com­mun­ists, Trotsky­ists and Mao­ism one one side, and the various re­vision­ists and re­form­ists on the other. It is good that the anarch­ist strain in Marx­ism should be re­mem­bered. At the same time we should re­mem­ber the Marx­ist strain in anarch­ism; the early anarch­ists always ac­know­leged Marx’s im­mense con­trib­u­tion to so­cial­ist thought, and most of us still stand on his ana­lysis of the class so­ciety. If we are glad to see some Marx­ists mov­ing towards us, per­haps we could see how far we can move towards them; Marx­ism with­out the party or the state isn’t very far away. In the London demon­stra­tion of solid­ar­ity with the French on May 26th, it was sig­nific­ant to see the Inter­na­tional So­cial­ism and Solid­ar­ity groups wel­com­ing the anarch­ists in a com­mon front against the So­cial­ist Labour League when Healy and Banda tried to keep things under tradi­tional Trotsky­ist con­trol. The same kind of thing on a much larger scale seems to have been hap­pen­ing in France; the March 22nd Movement is de­scribed as an in­formal coali­tion of anarch­ists, situ­a­tion­ists, Trotsky­ists and Mao­ists, united by com­mon action. The new un­formed, un­named Fifth Inter­na­tional may get back to the ori­ginal aims of the First Inter­na­tional after more than a cen­tury.

★

Anarchists. Well the part played by the anarch­ists at last con­vince people that anarch­ism is still a re­volu­tion­ary force? We are still play­ing our priv­ate game of watch­ing other groups pick­ing up ideas which they think are new but which we know are old ones from the anarch­ist past. The im­port­ance of young middle-class in­tel­lect­u­als, espe­cially uni­vers­ity stu­dents and grad­u­ates—now at­trib­uted to Herbert Marcuse and the stu­dent lead­ers in Germany, France and Britain, but de­veloped by Mikhail Bakunin a cen­tury ago from his ob­serv­a­tion of the <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: Ital­ian Repub­lic­ans">Ital­ian Repub­lic­ans and the <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: Russian pop­ul­ists">Russian pop­ul­ists, and later ex­pressed by Kropot­kin in An Appeal to the Young (1880). The im­port­ance of a con­scious minor­ity, though not an elite, a nucleus of agit­at­ors, though not of con­spir­at­ors—now at­trib­uted to Guevara and Debray, but again de­veloped by Bakunin at the end of his life and later one of the cent­ral prin­ciples of the anarch­ist com­mun­ists and syn­dic­al­ists.

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Nearly every single pro­posal made by the new rebels ap­pears in Kropot­kin or Mala­testa—but this is not im­port­ant; what is im­port­ant is that anarch­ists are among the new rebels. Ironic that the BBC pro­gramme on anarch­ism, which was broad­cast in the Third Pro­gramme last Janu­ary (and was printed in anarchy 85 last March), was called Far from the Bar­ri­cades, de­spite the pro­tests of some of the con­trib­ut­ors who didn’t feel very far; very near indeed, it seems. And yet how far is the English move­ment from being able to fol­low the French ex­ample? About as far as England is from being able to have such an ex­ample.

★

Syndical­ists. It seems to be for­got­ten that the CGT, which has played such a dis­grace­ful part, was not always a Com­mun­ist organ­isa­tion but was in fact the ori­ginal syn­dic­al­ist organ­isa­tion, being formed in 1895 pre­cisely to free the French trade union move­ment from part polit­ical con­trol and pre­pare for the so­cial re­volu­tion by way of the gen­eral strike. The Feder­a­tion des Bourses du Tra­vail should be equally well known be­cause of Emile Pouget, the great editor of its paper, La Voix du Peuple—to say no­thing of the 1906 Charter of Amiens (the clas­sic state­ment of syn­dic­al­ist prin­ciples) and the great wave of strikes sixty years ago, which should put the pre­sent events into pro­per per­spect­ive. Typ­ical that young rebels in the in­dust­rial move­ment have to re­learn old les­sons again and again, just like those in the in­tel­lectual move­ment.

★

Sorel. Is he so com­pletely for­got­ten? He is pretty well dis­credited as a seri­ous in­tel­lectual figure (and of course he wasn’t an anarch­ist or a the­oreti­cian of syn­dic­al­ism), but he did have some good ideas, and it’s odd that they haven’t been men­tioned. The general idea of the func­tion of myths—“not de­scrip­tions of things but ex­pres­sions of a de­term­ina­tion to act”—and the partic­ular idea of the myth of the general strike both seem relev­ant. Add the myth of the bar­ri­cades, the myth of the work­ing class, the myth of the soviet, and you have a fairly good pic­ture of what has hap­pened. How he would have en­joyed the at­tempt to burn down the Bourse!

★

Com­mun­ists. Will the part played by the Com­mun­ists at last con­vince people that Com­mun­ism is not a re­volu­tion­ary but a counter-revolu­tion­ary force? The French Com­mun­ist Party, the Gen­eral Con­feder­a­tion of Labour (CGT) which it con­trols, and the paper L’Humanité which it pub­lishes, have to­gether been one of the main factors pre­vent­ing the suc­cess of the re­volu­tion, after the gov­ern­ment, the army, and the police. Here is the cul­mina­tion of Bol­shev­ism after fifty years. (And the tradi­tional Trotsky­ists were better only be­cause they were weaker.) But the Com­mun­ists have now sur­vived so many ex­posures—Kron­stadt, China, Spain, East Germany, Hungary,

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Poland, and so on and so on—that they will prob­ably get over this one too. Even so, this is a par­tic­u­larly clear case of the tra­di­tional func­tion, fully docu­mented and played out in the glare of pub­li­city, and it should be rammed home. How do they live with them­selves, though? Have they for­got­ten how Marx re­sponded to the Paris Com­mune of 1871, and how the CGT used to lead rather than break strikes? They have changed in one way, though; they now betray re­volu­tions before they hap­pen, not after.

★

Social Demo­crats. Will the part played by the so­cial­ist parties at last con­vince people that so­cial demo­cracy, par­lia­ment­ary so­cial­ism, is not a serious polit­ical force at all? Dread­ful grey old men, stag­ger­ing along trying to catch up with the band-wagon; only Mendes-France ap­par­ently pre­serv­ing any in­teg­rity at all, ten years too late? How much longer do the French have to wait for com­plete con­sen­sus poit­ics, Wilson squash­ing the unions, Brandt in the co­ali­tion? With Mollet, Mit­ter­and (or is it Miller­and?), and the rest, it shouldn’t be long now. And yet so­cial demo­cracy is all too seri­ous, because it pre­sents the most likely “al­tern­at­ive” to naked cap­it­al­ism on one side and Com­mun­ism on the other, and because it is after all at least better than either of them.

★

Students. The im­port­ant thing is to de­fine their so­cial posi­tion—their class posi­tion, in fact. So­cial­ists of all kinds have stressed the im­port­ance of the de­sert­ers from the middle class, espe­cially the young. Stu­dents are pre­cisely young middle-class in­tel­lec­tu­als (what­ever their origin and wat­ever their in­tel­li­gence), and they are at a par­tic­u­lar stage in their lives when they are tem­por­ar­ily taken out of con­tact with the eco­nomic real­ities of their posi­tion, and at the same time brought into con­tact with the the­or­et­ical im­plica­tions of it. Which group is more likely to de­sert the middle class, and which group is more able to do so—though only tem­por­ar­ily in most cases? Not that “the stu­dents” as a class will rebel—most stu­dents are “over­whelm­ingly and ir­re­deem­ably bour­geois”, as Liz Smith put it in anarchy 82, and their class func­tion is to become the brain work­ers of the au­thor­it­arian, ma­na­gerial so­ciety (whether of­fi­cially cap­it­al­ist or com­mun­ist) which sup­ports them for a few years and which they sup­port for the rest of their lives. But the stu­dents who do rebel are among the most sig­ni­fic­ant stu­dents and also among the most sig­ni­fic­ant rebels, so they are doubly im­port­ant. Inter­est­ing how the French stu­dents before the ex­plo­sion com­bined the two usual pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of stu­dent rebels—narrow uni­vers­ity issues (re­stric­tions on learn­ing, on sex, on food, and so on) and wider polit­ical issues (Vietnam, race, cap­it­al­ism, and so on)—but were able to get beyond the usual im­passe only when they made a syn­thesis of them into what may be in­dif­fer­ently called narrow polit­ical or wider uni­vers­ity issues (students’ con­trol of the uni­vers­ity, workers’ con­trol of the factory, peoples’ con­trol of the streets). It is this syn­thesis,

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which stu­dents are uniquely placed to make, which begins a re­volu­tion. And it should get so­cial­ists of all kinds away from think­ing that the in­dus­trial strug­gle is the only one worth bother­ing about.

★

Workers. The im­port­ant thing is to realise that the work­ing class (in­dus­trial and agri­cul­tural alike) has not sud­denly become re­volu­tion­ary again. No class is re­volu­tion­ary—this is one of the major fal­la­cies of Marx­ism—but the im­port­ance of the work­ing class is its ob­ject­ive eco­nomic and so­cial posi­tion. Power is in the work­ers’ hands—or rather, power is the workers’ hands—but it is hardly ever used in a re­volu­tion­ary way. If any ideo­logy is pecu­liar to the work­ing class, it is that which used to be called “eco­nom­ism”—the pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with short-term eco­nomic gains (less work, more pay, bet­ter con­di­tions, bigger bene­fits and pen­sions, greater dig­nity) which makes sense in the work­ers’ posi­tion. The three sig­nif­ic­ant things about the French events are that the work­ers are not apath­etic, con­tented, stupid, or any of the things which the right-wing aca­dem­ics and journ­al­ists think, but are still able and will­ing to strike for their rights; that the work­ers are im­mensely power­ful on the single con­di­tion that they act to­gether, in their own inter­ests and on their own ac­count; and that the work­ers may use re­volu­tion­ary means but do not have re­volu­tion­ary ends, ex­cept when their es­sen­tially re­form­ist de­mands are re­sisted. In France the work­ers took the re­volu­tion­ary step of com­bin­ing a gen­eral strike with the oc­cu­pa­tion of the factor­ies, they were so power­ful that so­ciety almost fell into their hands over­night, but they let it go when their short-term gains were won. In the sense that a modern, ad­vanced, in­dus­trial­ised so­ciety can ap­pease the work­ers’ de­mands without col­lapsing, suc­cess­ful re­volu­tion does seem to be im­pos­sible. But it is worth no­ticing how fright­ened every­one is of the pos­sibil­ity that the work­ers won’t be satis­fied. Thou­sands of column inches about the stu­dents’ con­trol of the uni­vers­ities, but only a few about work­ers’ con­trol of the factor­ies; what actu­ally hap­pened, howwere things run, how much pro­duc­tion was car­ried on, how much dis­tribu­tion of raw ma­teri­als and fin­ished goods was there, did it work? And what about the mil­lions of agri­cul­tural work­ers? They after all have the ultim­ate power of life or death in their hands.

★

Leaders and prophets. The media look for lead­ers. But those they find deny that they are “leaders”; so do their “fol­low­ers”. A neat idea that they are simply “mega­phones” for their com­rades. Nice to see that they are not trusted to be any­thing more. This at least is some­thing we are fa­mil­iar with. And yet there is the in­ter­est­ing fact that pro­min­ent people in such move­ments do tend to be out­siders—Cohn-Bendit the German Jew, Dutschke from East Germany, Tariq Ali from Pakistan, Schoen­man from the United States; after all, the anarch­ist move­ment in this country has over and over again been brought back to life by foreign refugees. This is surely a gen­eral soci­olo­gical and anthro­polo­gical pheno­menon—the out­sider brings a new voice, a

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breath of fresh air. Thank good­ness for aliens, agit­at­ors, im­migrants.

  The media also look for prophets.